Can we get over hidden injuries of class and
gender? This is a suggestion made to one of
her recent presentations, and it links with
debates about the 'confessional voice'(295).
Steedman is the classic text here. Talking
about class raises anxiety, especially in
'theorised class analysis', but the broader issue
is what personal accounts actually produce,
especially for feminism. Academic texts
themselves 'inscribe complex class and gender
positions' (296).

Some feminists have had a working class
background, the first to go to university and to
enter caring professions. Welfare
institutions continue to engage them, and it is
there that they discovered 'the awkward
solidarities of feminism', including solidarity
with other former working class women.
Steedman and Walkerdine raised the issue of the
feminine dimensions of class subordination, and
subsequent autobiographical pieces ensued.
Class is seen as a form of embodiment, a
'"persistent ontological subjective
embrace"'[citing Kuhn], whatever the objective
circumstances. Why should this be?

Class has been experienced as a daily dimension of
social exchange, for the dominant as well as the
subordinate. The last subjectivity often
turns on 'every day denials'[of goods and
services] (297). This is routine humiliation
and suffering, focused especially on families, and
the dilemmas of leaving them to become
educated. The process involves 'perpetual
self disciplined attention to vocabulary and
accent… clothes' and style. There is
also 'incessant watchfulness'. In this way,
class is never overcome. Working in the
university provides a public opportunity to
address the issues and raise the political
implications, sometimes producing a
'recriminating and angry class voice', and this is
what produced by common about getting over it.

Childers identified '"the pit bull voice"' in
these statements. Steedman has also
demonstrated anger at remembering her mother's
humiliation at the hands of a female social
worker. Her mother particularly received
scrutiny as an example of 'a feminine form of
class subjugation'. However, Childers sees
these as too traumatic to permit solidarity with
those with other identities. It is one thing
to clarify a sense of difference, but the danger
is in exposing other women, to preserve wounded
identity and constant insecurity. She sees these
as signs of 'cumulative trauma'(298), and this can
distort memory and understanding, and develop
commitment to nourish that trauma rather than
letting it go.

Skeggs has addressed autobiography as far from an
innocent project, but one that draws legitimacy
from other forms such as confession: Foucault
reminds us of the links with power.
Sometimes public voices arise from some kind of
compulsion, so it is important to examine the
framework that produces them. Some women,
for example, use the old distinction between
deserving of respectable poor and others, as 'the
regulatory fictions of their bourgeois
"betters"'(299). Here the voice is
complicit. Sometimes feminist work requires
personal implications, and Skeggs is uneasy that
this might be a form of asset stripping of the
resources of working class women. However,
Skeggs has later recognized a new way of
developing 'self authorization', avoiding self
deprecation, becoming an authoritative subject, as
a result of escaping to university and
deliberately exceeding family experiences.

It is difficult to avoid 'a class tirade' (300),
since this is often the only way to challenge
symbolic violence, through anger, as Barbelet
[sic] argues. It might not be a matter of ressentiment,
as Skeggs suggests, but a more agentic
revenge. It can be seen as a more positive
'turning to difficult emotions', not just
pathology or victimization, becoming a collective
witness. This can form a 'defensive aggressive
melancholic feminist formation'reviving what's
been lost [shades of Ngai
valorizing negative emotions].

Class is both psychological and social, material
and cultural. It is a matter of structural
exclusion, and various 'discourses of disrespect
and moral disdain', both public and personal,
offering entire 'psychic and cultural
landscapes'. No wonder this can entangle
subjects in the past, despite massive ideological
efforts to get people to erase their 'material and
moral hurt'. This helps us understand the
power and processes of class theoretically.
Habitus might be useful as a concept, although
what is interesting is the refusal to
forget history, and to see how this is done
empirically in experience, as people encounter
hybridity or ambivalence (301).

Freud might be used by considering subjectivity as
a matter of 'filmic superimpositions', as
new experiences are layered on top of former
identifications. As class mobility ensues,
new selves have to be made, but there is the
'fiction of unitary identity required by the
neoliberal social order', and some upwardly mobile
subjects continue to feel shame, but also a sense
of investment and resistance, 'the emotional
politics of class subjectivity'. This needs
to be added to explain the actual operations of
the habitus.

Steedman's book is generation specific, and
challenged dominant views, the 'public
male-centric narratives about the epic
revolutionary class'. She focuses on painful
entanglements and relations, the role of class
contempt which affects everyone, the importance of
recognition and respect. She offers ' a
vicarious politics of class desire', (302)
offering the possibility of no longer being
abject, while expressing solidarity with
parents. She uses academic analysis as part
of a 'myth of revengeful deliverance', reversing
class relations, shaming the perpetrator.
This operates at the ideological level as 'a class
fiction', fuelled by symbolic capital. At
the same time, this is not a position open to 'the
majority of working class women', Skeggs points
out. [No, but you can help them in specific
circumstances?].

Freud on mourning and melancholia can also
help. It says there are successful kinds of
mourning, where egos gradually sever attachment,
and distorted kinds - melancholia, a loss of
interest in the world, an inability to find
another object of desire, 'a manic need to
communicate, and especially a severe self
hatred'. Vera Brittain is seen as
demonstrating such melancholia, unable to console
herself because she has not been able to stop
people dying, while not wanting to move on because
that would be a betrayal. We see these
trends in some working class voices.
Melancholia risks 'the triumphs of the class which
these authors are destined to join' (303).

We can analyze specific psychic elements as the
result of 'historically specific subject and
social positions'. Some events are hybrid,
with elements from both past and present
investments, and they can 'carry both personal
longings and political convictions'. They
have produced defences of the welfare state, for
example, a political dimension to individual
grief. However, is this nostalgia for the
past and therefore melancholia, 'grief for the
lost class... and the lost politics of
hope'? However, they may also conceal a
great desire to succeed, even though this will
destroy the old working class self - this is 'the
central contradiction' that haunts accounts of
working class selves and their frequent accounts
of 'umbrage'. There is a need to stay
invested in the past to assuage guilt and hold out
hope, but any mobility must be aggressive towards
those left behind. These feelings can only
be partly projected: it is no good blaming 'the
culpable middle class other' because this also
inevitably implicates ourselves.

A certain psychological capital is necessary 'for
living a hyphenated position' (304). The
'passionate testimony' of others in the same
position is a useful resource, and also helps us
to think about material dimensions, and structural
reasons for escape. The 'old logic of
rebellion' is no longer adequate, since escape
always involves compliance as well. Bourdieu
and Freud can help assert 'the emotional politics
of class'. Nostalgia can be seen as part of
personal resistance to bourgeois identification,
as part of 'a melancholic feminist class
formation'. It is also 'a refusal to let go
of alternative memories'. Narratives like
Steedman's are clearly 'inherently contradictory'
in this sense. Subjectivity is never finally
achieved, but should be seen more as a film with
layers, and expressions show the affects of
particular historical and political
settings. It is hard to attach these
necessarily to conventional political projects,
given the success of neo liberalism. Such
texts and to suggest the class is not natural
binary or intrinsic, but that it takes place in
'an affective habitus of hyphenated "becoming"'.

These accounts can show us something about the
phenomenology of power, and point towards a new
feminist materialism, focusing on resources to
produce 'psychic and social embodiment in line
with or against the logics of individualization'
(305). We need both a multidimensional and
motivated account of class, especially as class
antagonism becomes increasingly feminized.
For example recent work by McRobbie notes the
class contempt in media texts demonizing female
chavs. Autobiographies and other stories can
show how it is possible to seek resources to
oppose this personal class disdain. It is
necessary not to let go as we confront the academy
and dominant others.

Although class identities can be experienced as
'an irritating gritty tendency', they do motivate
us to 'worry away at the system', which is both
valued and 'still hated'. Not getting over it also
means that is not just the fully abject who have
these feelings: the point now is to explain how
class relations affect everybody adversely even
'participants and beneficiaries'.

It helps us realize that identity is not just a
binary difference in language, but a matter of the
regulation of the other that helps us define
ourselves. There is a limit to the amount of
manoeuvrability on offer, because '(class)
symbolic orders always pre-exist their occupants',
but they are also always renewed. Is equally
interesting to ask how the privileged 'absorb a
dominant and corrosive awareness of their power'
(306), and how some of them also deny identify
with their privilege, and refuse '"resentment and
disgust"' [quoting Childers]. This requires
an encounter with the wounds of class, and an
examination of 'different rationalisations and
resistances', some of which will be revealed in
working class autobiography.